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Much ink has been spilled, and countless TikToks recorded, in an effort to explain the female fervor unleashed by the series “Heated Rivalry.” I, a thirty-eight-year-old woman who owns a T-shirt that bears the logo of Shane Hollander’s Montreal Metros and another that celebrates Ilya Rozanov’s Boston Raiders (Valentine’s Day gifts, it should be said, from my indulgent husband), don’t find its appeal so mystifying. Two gorgeous young men, as elegantly muscled as Myron’s discus thrower, have ecstatically unbridled, mutually satisfying sex to a soundtrack designed to tickle elder millennials’ nostalgia-pleasure centers, all while falling in the kind of soul-sustaining love that most of us can only dream of. The bodies: hot. The feelings: tender. The hockey: minimal. What’s not to like?

I thought of “Heated Rivalry” recently while finishing “DTF St. Louis,” a seven-episode HBO show that deals, rather differently, with the liberatory potential of men’s love for one another. When it began, the show seemed to promise a fairly conventional murder mystery. Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), an American Sign Language interpreter, and Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), a TV weatherman in a suburb of St. Louis, meet on the job and become fast friends. At a lawn party devoted to the game of cornhole, Clark flirts with Floyd’s wife and the two soon begin an affair, meeting for afternoon assignations at the local Quality Garden Suites. Meanwhile, Clark introduces Floyd to DTF St. Louis, an app that facilitates hookups between discreet adults. By the end of the first episode, Floyd is dead, apparently poisoned in the locker room of the public pool where he had arranged an early-morning rendezvous with TigerTiger, a match from the app. TigerTiger’s profile is soon revealed to have been created by Clark, presumably for the purpose of catfishing Floyd; when detectives find security-camera footage of Clark pedalling away from the scene of the crime in his distinctive recumbent bicycle, he is arrested and charged with the murder.

Naturally, nothing is as it first appears. As Clark spins his story in the interrogation room, suspicion starts to shift to Floyd’s wife, Carol Love-Smernitch (Linda Cardellini). Floyd, a kind husband who managed to form a bond with Carol’s misfit adolescent son, was nonetheless dead weight when it came to the household’s finances. He also had Peyronie’s disease, whose primary symptom—a dramatically curved penis—may have inhibited the couple’s sex life. Could Carol, who supplements her income as an employee at Purina’s corporate headquarters by umpiring Little League games, have wanted Floyd out of the picture so that she could collect life insurance and ride Clark happily ever after into the Midwestern sunset?

This premise, bolstered by excellent performances all around, could easily have sustained a totally enjoyable TV show. But what turns “DTF St. Louis” from a fine show into a fascinating one is the curious nature of the relationship between the two men at its core. Before he meets Floyd, Clark is the image of stultifying middle age on autopilot. His life revolves around his undemanding, all-but-obsolete job; in a perfect, perverse detail, he and his wife exchange high-fives in greeting and farewell as if they were teammates rather than spouses. Even his affair with Carol, which involves a goofy kink featuring sex-robot role-play and a proclivity for what Clark primly refers to as “weight placement” (Carol’s, on Clark’s face), is nothing more than the latest cliché in a life defined by them.

Floyd is something different: an openhearted naïf who insists on embracing the indifferent world in spite of its endless disappointments. When he joins DTF St. Louis, Floyd—a single-entendre guy if ever there was one—chooses Rocksolid as his username because, as he tells Clark, “I feel like I’m a pretty dependable person.” In the third episode—the show weaves back and forth in time, as the progress of the police investigation is augmented and undercut by flashbacks revealing the true nature of events—we see Floyd go to a diner for a breakfast date with Modern Love, his first (and only) match from the app. Modern Love used a photo of David Bowie in a long dress as his profile picture, and so the ingenuous, myopic Floyd expects a woman. In fact, Modern Love is a man; after their meal, he kisses Floyd in the parking lot, an experience that sends Floyd reeling. Later, at a gym, where Floyd and Clark discuss the situation while squatting and thrusting in comically erotic proximity, Floyd shares that he “Frenched” Modern Love not out of lust, or even curiosity, but out of sympathy. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” he explains, “and feel like it was not cool or it was inappropriate for us to do that if he wanted to do that.” Floyd’s sincerity, the startling extremity of his concern for the comfort of others, snaps Clark out of his depressed, and depressing, complacency. It stirs his soul. “I loved Floyd,” he tells the detectives, as the camera cuts to a shot of Floyd, shirtless, embracing Clark and telling him the same thing.

There is a fantastical, science-fiction aspect to “DTF St. Louis.” It’s as if these two middle-aged American men grew up in a world in which the phrase “no homo” was never uttered; in which two heterosexual men frankly and repeatedly confessing their feelings for another is not taboo, or suspect, or even a little bit weird. (In a resonant bit of casting, Modern Love is played by Peter Sarsgaard, who was so terrifying, at the start of his career, as John Lotter, the Nebraskan ex-con who rapes and murders the trans man Brandon Teena, played by Hilary Swank, in the 1999 film “Boys Don’t Cry.” In that Midwestern story, difference was a threat punishable by death. Here, it is treated as a straightforward fact of life.) It is far easier for the detectives investigating Floyd’s death to imagine that he was secretly gay and leading a double life than it is for them to grasp the less salacious but more bizarre truth, and that may be true for viewers, too.

Analyzing the passionate response to “Heated Rivalry,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel used the term “corrective experience” to explain the series’ cathartic effect on so much of its audience. By the end of that show, the anxiety and isolation that freight life in the closet had burned away, leaving a happy, hopeful ending in place of familiar narrative disaster; love is found, secrecy is banished, and all is well. “DTF St. Louis” offers the tempting possibility of similar rewards in a less conventional framework. Determined to “B out the B”—“bring out the best” in each other—Floyd and Clark exchange compliments and confidences; they take a wine-tasting bike trip together and glide beneath the dappled foliage, holding hands. Even Clark’s affair with Carol turns out to have a part for Floyd to play. What would it look like, the show seems to ask, if straight men could access, without shame, the kind of emotional and physical closeness that is generally the province of close female friendships? “I feel safe,” Floyd tells Clark, of their relationship. Trying on a kind of spiritual drag, these guys find something that looks like freedom.

But desire refuses to relinquish its demands. Floyd wants to be loved, and not just platonically. He is concerned about his weight: he can’t stop comparing his present, stocky self with the nude photos taken in his prime and published as an Indiana Jones-themed centerfold in Playgirl. In spite of their closeness, both he and Clark confess that they suffer from persistent loneliness. In one sad scene, Floyd and Carol begin to make love, only for Carol to pull away in repulsion. Floyd longs to be wanted again—to be with Carol “full on,” Peyronie’s be damned—and it is Clark’s frankly deranged attempt to help fulfill this wish, to prove to his friend that he is as lovable to the rest of the world as he is to Clark, that leads to tragedy.

Harbour, by all appearances, has fully committed himself to the physicality of his role. Not since Tony Soprano stood semi-naked by his fridge, pawing at a plate of gabagool, can I recall seeing such a big, bare male body so ogled by the camera. In “The Sopranos,” Tony’s girth was a mark of masculinity, of dominance. For Floyd, in this era of GLP-1s and looksmaxxing, it’s a blatant sign of failure. The roughly thirty-pound latex belly that Harbour wore to give Floyd extra heft is on full display in the show’s final episode, when Floyd and Clark strip down to their boxer briefs and dance by the pool lockers in a kind of tête-à-tête disco. After the idyllic variations of the male form on display in “Heated Rivalry,” it’s hilarious and strangely sublime to watch these two aging bodies, one effortfully trim, the other big and unruly, bump awkwardly around in the dark. It’s not the cottage, but it’ll do.

On the evening that I watched this scene, Lily Allen, Harbour’s ex-wife, was nearby at King’s Theatre in Brooklyn, performing on her West End Girl tour. On her 2025 album of the same name, Allen gave a semi-autobiographical account of the couple’s breakup owing, in her telling, to Harbour’s emotional manipulation and sexual infidelity. (He stands accused of that most modern of romantic crimes: pressuring his partner into an open relationship to facilitate erotic betrayal.) In that light, Harbour’s choice to take on the role of Floyd seems like a canny public-relations coup. It’s hard to think of a more sympathetic recent straight-male character on television; it’s enough to make you suspect that Harbour may not merely be playing Floyd but wearing him as a kind of disguise.

Still, the show itself doesn’t let Floyd so easily off the hook. His apparently boundless sympathy for others stops short of his own wife. Carol loves him; she’s also exasperated by his failure to sustain his share of their domestic life, to do the basic caretaking that marriage entails. Floyd says he’ll cancel the lawn guy to help the family save money; he forgets. He’s up for a big job; he skips the interview. Floyd, distraught by his own physical failures, is nevertheless repulsed by the sight of Carol in her big, burly ump gear. He builds Clark up while letting her down. The barbed fact is that the woman caught in the middle of this unusual male arrangement benefits from none of their newfound emotional enlightenment. “I want your dreams,” Carol tells Clark at the start of their affair, the better to make them come true. Cardellini plays Carol as strategically seductive, a woman who can sparkle when she must. Her own dreams are modest: bills paid, tuition covered, a new set of sheets. She gets what she’s after, but somehow she’s still left holding the bag. ♦

The course of fifteen-year-old Niall Kennedy’s life changes the first day he walks to school with his almost-stepbrother, Ruben. It’s 1986 and, like so many boys with spindly physiques and a love of science fiction, Niall (Mitchell Robertson) is dogged by bullies—though, in his case, the harassment is also a result of his mom’s romantic involvement with a woman, Ruben’s scowling mother. Niall, closeted and cerebral, is terrified of Ruben (Stuart Campbell), an earthy, charismatic bruiser fresh from a juvenile-detention center, but he intuits that the older boy may be his best chance at survival. When Niall’s tormentors yell their usual slurs on that fateful morning, it’s Ruben who makes the next move. He shoves Niall into a wall and asks, with their faces inches apart, “Are these guys bothering you, Bambi?” They both know that Ruben is a pit bull, and that he’s asking for permission to be unleashed. When Niall finally cops to the obvious, Ruben pulls out a knife and urges him to head to class alone: “You’re not a witness if you don’t see what happens.”

The new HBO/BBC drama “Half Man” follows Niall and Ruben, who consider themselves brothers even after their mothers’ breakup, for the next three decades. Set largely in a working-class neighborhood of Glasgow marked by chipped paint and dowdy patterns, the series adheres to the jagged rhythms of Niall and Ruben’s relationship, skipping over years of separation or estrangement to catch them as they reënter each other’s orbits, willingly or otherwise. Niall (played as an adult by Jamie Bell) might deploy his sibling as an attack dog, but he can’t insure that Ruben (a newly ripped Richard Gadd) won’t occasionally charge at him, too. As their mutual competitiveness grows shockingly ugly, Niall learns to turn Ruben’s Samsonian strength and fury against him, knocking down the pillars of Ruben’s own life.

Men, society tells us ad nauseam, are simple creatures. Even those beating the drum of the male-loneliness crisis seem convinced that the problem of men’s stunted emotional lives is easily solved: more group activities, less time online. Gadd, the creator of “Half Man” as well as one of its stars, clearly believes the matter is more complicated than that—and makes the dynamic between his two leads as thorny, codependent, and, at times, troublesomely erotic as it can get. (The other male-bonding drama of the moment, “DTF St. Louis,” in which one middle-aged suburban dad is credibly suspected of murdering another, is practically feel-good by comparison.) Gadd’s ambitions are evident from the opening scene, when, in a framing device set in the present day, Ruben crashes Niall’s wedding—an event he learned of that morning. The pair sequester themselves in a shed while guests revel outside in the sunshine. “You look gorgeous,” Ruben tells Niall. “If I wasn’t family, I’d get up underneath that kilt right away.” He reaches for Niall’s privates in a juvenile show of dominance. We soon see that Ruben has made a lifelong habit of such sexualized power plays—and that Niall’s deep-seated shame about his queerness was likely augmented by shame about his attraction to a man who calls him brother.

“Half Man” is a grimmer affair than Gadd’s previous series, “Baby Reindeer,” a fictionalized account of his experience being aggressively stalked by a woman for four years. The most potent material in the new show is connected to themes he explored there as well: internalized homophobia, the sexual assault of men, and the evasion of blame. In “Half Man,” Gadd’s treatment of these themes is richer and more mature; with the two projects, each defined by shifting notions of victimhood and culpability, he’s emerged as a bard of self-loathing. Ruben, never book-smart, is aggrieved by the doors that open for Niall as a result of his academic achievements. Niall, for his part, only comes to hate himself more as gay acceptance goes mainstream, his initial distress over his sexuality compounded by humiliation at being unable to get past that distress. His yearning for Ruben’s approval and fear of his own desires are so acute that, when the show flashes forward to Niall’s wedding again, one half expects to see a woman waiting at the altar.

His soon-to-be spouse, as it turns out, is someone he met decades earlier—a reminder that, for a story with such chronological breadth, the cast of characters is surprisingly small. But the meagreness of the world befits its protagonists, both of whom become stuck in certain phases after failing to come to grips with their formative traumas. The size of the ensemble also belies its strength. Of particular note is Niall’s mother, Lori (Neve McIntosh), who joins her ex-girlfriend, Maura (Marianne McIvor), in defending Ruben despite his many transgressions. As the show progresses, she treads a blurred line between offering Ruben second chances and simply enabling him, especially as his antisocial rampages repeatedly land him in prison. Her unsentimentality toward her own son, meanwhile, is funny, upsetting, and, I suspect, thoroughly British. “I’ve given you life,” she scolds Niall. “I don’t need to give you respect.”

Gadd’s post-penitentiary Ruben is another formidable presence, endowed with a leonine rumble that betrays his dissatisfactions, and a predatory gaze that quickly sizes up those around him. But, as the series’ writer, Gadd doesn’t deliver much in the way of fresh insight about troubled masculinity. Ruben is a hurt person who hurts people, and the kind of patriarchal figure who sees it as his right to subdue members of his own family, as long as he also protects them from outsiders. The most didactic and mannered scenes are the ones that purport to explain him; for all these efforts to psychoanalyze, he ultimately feels more like a cautionary tale than a fully realized character.

But the show’s plotting and Niall’s exquisite complexity more than make up for Ruben’s relative flatness. The many leaps in time to the wedding—to which Ruben shows up on a motorcycle, angry enough to knock his brother out with a single punch—consistently ratchet up the sense of dread, and the suspense over why or how these two have stayed enmeshed. (A flashback to Niall’s university days offers a clue: alone and overwhelmed in his first week away from home, he calls Ruben in the middle of the night, whispering, “I need you,” as though relapsing; Ruben arrives the next morning like a vampire who’s been invited in.) The sad but realistic turns in their lives are engrossing, as is their slow convergence. If Ruben is blatantly pathological in his obsession with status, his tendency toward self-sabotage, and his inability to take responsibility, Niall is gradually revealed to be afflicted with the same qualities, albeit in a less expected package. His characterization benefits from its rootedness in a specific era, when it was more understandable that he might have been too busy trying on masks to sort out his identity—or to reckon with his complicity in his brother’s crimes. Bell, whose screen roles have long radiated decency and sensitivity, channels that guilelessness once more, only to expose it as yet another façade that helps Niall to conceal his darker impulses.

Against all good sense, Niall pursues a childhood dream of becoming a writer—an aspiration he cultivates by reimagining his father, a bartender who scribbled on the side and died young, as a thwarted literary talent. His breakthrough comes with an autobiographical novel, which centers on a thinly veiled Ruben. Critics and journalists prove more interested in the book’s antihero than in its author; as Ruben himself crows, “I’m your fuckin’ muse.” But Niall is the series’ singular achievement, in part for his awareness that he’ll always be a shadow to a man who has more life force than he knows what to do with. On his wedding day, Ruben asks him whether he loves him. After dissembling for a minute, Niall gives an honest answer: “It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt.” ♦

The year 2025 presented a full distillation of the Daniel Lopatin experience. The distinguished electronic artist, who performs as Oneohtrix Point Never, co-produced one of the biggest pop records of that year, the Weeknd’s dark finale, “Hurry Up Tomorrow”; scored Josh Safdie’s adrenalized Best Picture nominee, “Marty Supreme”; and released his own mutative album, “Tranquilizer,” an ambient archival project that mimes since-deleted nineties sample libraries that Lopatin discovered in the Internet Archive. His music has spanned genres and mediums, with the composer filling various roles, but its through line is its sense of the uncanny and Lopatin’s understanding of how warping sonic textures can tap into surreality. His process, which bridges the neoclassical, the avant-garde, and even the kitsch, has made him one of the defining trackmasters of the twenty-first century. “I’m an amateur musician. I’m a professional recordist,” he told the Creative Independent.

Illustration by Arthur Sevestre

Lopatin’s instincts serve him well across all of his creative endeavors, but chiefly in his own compositional work, which now spans eleven LPs that feel committed to creating a repository of every possible sound—from the eerie, liminal minimalism of “Replica” (2011) to the turbocharged rave-pop of “Garden of Delete” (2015) to the psychedelic collage “Magic Oneohtrix Point Never” (2020). On April 29-30, Oneohtrix Point Never opens Bang on a Can’s four-day Long Play Festival, at Pioneer Works, for his only currently slated shows in America this year. His set, which follows a performance by the jazz keyboardist John Medeski, features accompanying visuals from the experimental digital artist Freeka Tet.—Sheldon Pearce

As dramatic stakes go, the question of whether to install a stop sign on a picturesque block might seem low. But that’s only until you meet the Vernon Point Neighborhood Association in “The Balusters,” a sharp comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire, for Manhattan Theatre Club. The association’s newest member is Kyra (Anika Noni Rose), who joined after moving to the affluent enclave it is in charge of preserving—or policing, depending on your perspective. Neighborhood gossip delivers revelations; seemingly minor matters involving porch railings swell into arguments about social justice. Lindsay-Abaire’s multidirectional repartee gets added zip from the first-rate cast, especially Margaret Colin as the unapologetically blunt Ruth. With propulsive direction by Kenny Leon.—Dan Stahl (Friedman; through May 24.)

What if the birth of John the Baptist was celebrated at a black-lit basement rave? The French singer-songwriter Oklou conjures such a scene on “Harvest Sky”—an anthemic dance tune inspired by her memories of la Fête de la Saint-Jean—from her 2025 record, “Choke Enough.” The album is full of strange, brilliant contradictions; Oklou slides masterfully between fun and eccentricity, pump and pathos. On the title track, she threatens to crash a car for a good photo, and then ponders whether her dad might appreciate an especially pretty moonlit night. Synthesizers warble and phasings range from gritty-grindy to flip-phone-keypad mellow. Oklou is taking “Choke Enough” on tour after postponing for a year to spend time with her newborn. And monolinguals needn’t worry, she sings in English.—Leo Lasdun (Terminal 5; May 2-3.)

Parsons Dance.Photograph by Rachel Neville / Courtesy Parsons Dance

Parsons Dance has long been known for its high-energy, high-spirited style. That’s also the trademark of Courtney (Balenciaga) Washington, a choreographer from the worlds of competition dance and vogue ballrooms. “Fearless,” her first work for the Parsons troupe, has fun in the crossover space, demanding precision and fierceness from the dancers as they arrange themselves in one formation after another. The program also features a première by the choreographer David Parsons himself, set to the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and one by Mayte Natalio, a former company member who’s made a name for herself as a choreographer of theatre, including “Suffs” on Broadway.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; April 29-May 10.)

Even amid Broadway’s queer renaissance, Richard O’Brien’s “The Rocky Horror Show” stands out as a transgressive blast. Luke Evans is a gloriously seductive Frank-N-Furter; Josh Rivera an adorable Rocky; Amber Gray a sharp Riff-Raff; Michaela Jaé Rodriguez a sweet Columbia; and Stephanie Hsu a spicy standout as Janet, wriggling with horndog virtuosity through “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a Me.” Rachel Dratch is perfectly arch as the smoking-jacketed narrator, riffing effortlessly with the audience. (No one threw toast, but we yelled “asshole” and “slut.”) There’s no ironing out the kinky plot, thank the Lord—Frank tricks the couple into sex; gender identities remain queenily chaotic. The director Sam Pinkleton (“Oh, Mary!”) uses simple, clever devices such as tiny, neon-green castles and wacky placards, lending the show a shaggy pro-am energy. Give yourself over to ultimate pleasure.—Emily Nussbaum (Studio 54; through July 19.)

Dan Levy and Taylor Ortega.Photograph by Spencer Pazer / Courtesy Netflix

“Big Mistakes,” on Netflix, co-created by Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott, has a manic, overheated energy: Nicky (Levy), a quasi-closeted pastor, and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega), an elementary-school teacher, are unhappy in their jobs; when Morgan steals a necklace, they’re kidnapped by a Turkish gangster named Yusuf, who forces them to perform odd jobs. Nicky and Morgan’s narcissistic mom, Linda, is played by a wonderfully typecast Laurie Metcalf. The gangland drama is deeper and darker than the domestic one, strengthened by the unexpected portrayal of the Russian toughs as bumbling in their own way. The show comes close to making a point about criminal and family hierarchies—but it, like its characters, has a policy of shooting first, asking questions later.—Inkoo Kang

“Michael,” the story of Michael Jackson’s rise to fame, presents a surprisingly detailed view of the behind-the-scenes dealings on which his career depended. As a child performing with his brothers at the family home in Gary, Indiana, young Michael (Juliano Krue Valdi) is beaten by his father, Joe (Colman Domingo), who demands obedience along with musical discipline. The Jackson Five find success; then, in the late seventies, the adult Michael (played, with extraordinary flair, by Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s real-life nephew) seeks a solo career—and confronts Joe’s domineering maneuvers. The director, Antoine Fuqua, working with a script by John Logan, portrays Michael as an emotionally stunted and grievously wounded artist of historic greatness. The movie omits allegations that the singer sexually assaulted children (which he denied).—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

1. “The Idiot,” from the journalist M. Gessen and Serial Productions, explores the case of Gessen’s “least favorite cousin” and a murder-for-hire plot. Cousin Allen, a shady-seeming braggart living in Russia, shows up to Gessen’s father’s house in Cape Cod with his young son, having apparently abducted the boy; Gessen—a wryly appealing narrator-detective—is immediately suspicious, and unspools the head-spinning details of Allen’s behavior while treating the listener like an intelligent friend.

2. In “Passenger Seat,” the independent journalist and first-time podcaster Tom Joudrey explores the strange case of a retired lawyer who was kidnapped at gunpoint in 2012 while walking her dog in rural Ohio. She survived, and now Joudrey wants to know why she helped her captor—and thanked him in the courtroom. The revelations get familial, psychological, and stunning, as do Joudrey’s conversations with the kidnapper, now in prison. The series’ earnestly naïve sound design (horses neighing, cars revving) only enhanced my appreciation of Joudrey’s sophisticated storytelling.

Raven Chanticleer outside Madison Square Garden, in 1971.Photograph by Don Jacobsen / Newsday RM / Getty

3. The African American Wax Museum, in Harlem, was the singular creation of the artist and eccentric Raven Chanticleer, a sharecropper’s son from South Carolina who reinvented himself, spectacularly, in Manhattan. After he died, in 2002, his relatives sold the museum’s building and, it was rumored, destroyed its contents. In “Raven,” the journalist Gavin Whitehead investigates what happened to Chanticleer’s wax Harriet Tubman, Langston Hughes, and other creations, and unearths unexpected wonders galore, set to subtle background music that riffs on “Take the A Train.”

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Welcome to the nineteen-nineties
• The magic is coming back
• Jay McInerney, eternal party correspondent

On April 7th, when the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a warning that cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian regime had gained access to internet-connected programmable logic controllers (P.L.C.s), small computers used by myriad American critical-infrastructure sectors—including municipal energy, water, and wastewater agencies—to automate their systems, Operation Epic Fury was in its thirty-eighth day. April 7th was also the day that President Donald Trump declared both a “total and complete victory” over Iran and a fragile two-week ceasefire while negotiators attempted to hammer out a peace plan. The CISA advisory, which noted that the Iranian-linked cyber actors were “conducting this activity to cause disruptive effects within the United States,” was a blunt reminder that, in the digital age, the battlefield has expanded to encompass the geography of everyday life.

Conventional warfare, in which bombs are dropped, shipping channels are mined, and the Geneva Conventions apply more broadly, tends to be time-limited (even if the conflict endures for a long period of time). Nation-state hacking, in contrast, is a constant feature of geopolitics. The Iranians have been knocking around in the United States’ critical infrastructure for years. In 2013, according to the Department of Justice, a hacker affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps infiltrated the control system of a dam in New York State. Ten years later, Iranian-backed hackers breached the Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, water system and gained access to the P.L.C. that controlled water pressure. (The intrusion set off an alarm, alerting workers who were able to switch to a manual system.) As Jake Braun, the executive director of the University of Chicago’s Cyber Policy Initiative, wrote recently in the Washington Post, water systems are especially vulnerable because they often lack basic cybersecurity protection.

Still, why would a government more than six thousand miles away from a suburban Pennsylvania town that has fewer than ten thousand inhabitants be poking around in a distant municipal water system? The easy answer: because it could. Small municipalities typically have neither the expertise nor the funds to adequately secure their infrastructure, leaving them open to intrusion. This enables adversaries to enter such systems to learn how they work; consider it a kind of field trip. Then, once an intrusion is discovered—perhaps by design—it generates fear beyond the borders of a small town, sending the message that an attack could happen at scale somewhere else. One need only to look at what happened in the winter of 2015, when Russia-linked hackers launched a successful attack on a power grid in Ukraine, to glimpse what might happen if an adversary with access to the grid that powers, say, New York City, were to attack it. Anything that required power would go dark: homes, stores, cash machines, elevators, water pumps, traffic lights, heat.

To be clear, in this country, this is still the stuff of B-list thrillers. As Alex K. Jones, who chairs the department of electrical engineering and computer science at Syracuse University, told me, the Iranians have not unleashed what he called a Hollywood-style attack because it’s unlikely that they have the capacity to do so. (Another possible explanation is that launching a cyberattack on a major U.S. city would be an act of war that could invite an unprecedented response.) Even so, a major attack is not necessary to inflict pain. The intrusion into the industrial P.L.C. controllers mentioned in the CISA advisory resulted in business disruptions and financial losses. And it was only one of scores of hacks that, according to a number of cybersecurity firms, have been carried out, both in the lead-up to the conflict and during it. These have included distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers unleash an army of bots from millions of I.P. addresses to overwhelm a server with internet traffic in order to crash the websites of companies, government agencies, and the military, causing chaos, friction, and loss of services, and at least one hack in which a health-care organization had its data held hostage for ransom. “We don’t live in a world where there is not going to be an impact on U.S. citizens at home,” James Turgal, a retired executive assistant director to the F.B.I. who is now the vice-president of Optiv, a cybersecurity consultancy based in Denver, told me. “From a cyber perspective, we’re very early on.”

In fact, weeks before the first Israeli and U.S. bombs were dropped on Iran, “threat hunter” researchers from Symantec and Carbon Black, two cybersecurity firms that are part of Broadcom, reported that the hacking group Seedworm had infiltrated the networks of an American airport, a bank, and a U.S. software company that does business in Israel as a defense and aerospace contractor. The researchers wrote that, because Seedworm already had “a presence on U.S. and Israeli networks prior to the current hostilities,” the group was in “a potentially dangerous position to launch attacks. While we have disrupted these breaches, other organizations could still be vulnerable to attack.” Bombs detonate once, but, unless cyber vulnerabilities are patched, they can remain available to malicious actors.

Seedworm, which also goes by the names MuddyWater, Static Kitten, and Mango Sandstorm, among others, is, according to the F.B.I and CISA, a front for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Employing such proxies is a common feature of state-sponsored hacking: these groups obscure a regime’s involvement and offer plausible deniability. To actually track “some guy on a keyboard in Tehran, at a particular I.P. address, at a particular moment, is very difficult,” Turgal explained, which then makes attribution challenging and retaliation tricky.

On March 11th, twelve days into Operation Epic Fury, the Handala Hack Team, which, according to the Justice Department, is another MOIS front group, allegedly unleashed a “wiperware” attack on Stryker, a Michigan-based global medical-technology company, causing disruption on thousands of devices worldwide. A post on X, apparently from Handala, stated, “We announce to the world that in retaliation for the brutal attack on the Minab school and in response to ongoing cyber assaults against the infrastructure of the Axis of Resistance, our major cyber operation has been executed with complete success.” Though no one was killed in the Stryker attack, some surgeries had to be postponed, implants could not be delivered to patients, and the company’s share price plummeted.

While disrupting the business of an American multinational company may seem a pallid response to the destruction of an Iranian primary school where more than a hundred children were killed, such asymmetric attacks in the physical and digital realms have been a feature of this conflict. As Israel and the U.S. were bombing Iran, Iran was not only attacking Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states; it was launching cyberattacks against American allies in Europe and companies across the Middle East in an effort to pressure the American leadership to cease the attacks. Iran has also conducted drone strikes that damaged data centers in the region that are owned by Amazon Web Services, which operates the world’s largest cloud platform—high-value targets with major financial and operational ramifications. Alexander Leslie, a government-affairs senior adviser at the threat-intelligence firm Recorded Future, wrote in an e-mail that “Iran’s strength has long been persistence, coercive signaling . . . and techniques that create real disruption without needing exotic capabilities.”

If there are any takeaways from the CISA advisory, it’s that companies and municipalities must take steps to secure their systems and stay vigilant. Too bad, then, that three days before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, fired dozens of people from the counterintelligence unit responsible for monitoring Iranian threats. (CNN reported that they were also responsible for investigating Trump’s classified-document haul.) Days later, Patel himself became a target of Handala, which leaked hundreds of private e-mails and photos from before his time at the Bureau. The F.B.I director “will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims,” the group’s website proclaimed, alongside photographs of Patel smoking a cigar and taking a picture of himself holding a bottle of rum. (The Times reported that a spokesperson for the F.B.I. confirmed the attack, though the paper added that it appeared that the website was being hosted by a server in Russia.)

CISA, which operates under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, has also been decimated by the Trump Administration. In the first year of President Trump’s current term, around a third of the agency’s employees either left under pressure or were fired. The team responsible for testing the nation’s security defenses was among those pushed out. Trump’s 2027 budget, released a few days before CISA issued its current advisory, proposes to cut more than seven hundred million dollars from the agency; among other things, the budget eliminates its election-security program. (In 2024, the Iranians are thought to have targeted the campaigns of both Trump and Kamala Harris.) “Cutting its budget by $707 million, on top of what’s already been cut, is a gift to every nation-state actor that’s been quietly targeting U.S. critical infrastructure,” Seemant Sehgal, the founder and C.E.O. of BreachLock, a cyber-defense company based in New York City, told the website Nextgov.

The bombing in Iran has been paused, at least for now, but Leslie told me, “The ceasefire does not end the cyber conflict; it changes its rhythm. On our side, the leading indicators remain the same: renewed scanning, credential attacks, and opportunistic exploitation. . . . The strategic effect Iran often seeks is not just technical disruption but also uncertainty, mistrust, and political pressure.” Or, as a post on a Handala social-media account put it, “We did not begin this war, but we will be the ones to finish it. And let it be clear: The cyber war did not begin with the military conflict, and it will not end with any military ceasefire.” ♦

In February, 2019, the Democrat-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform organized a hearing with a star witness they thought would shine a light on the sprawling nexus of scandal engulfing Donald Trump’s first Administration. That witness was Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, who had already pleaded guilty to orchestrating hush-money payments to two women with whom Trump had allegedly had affairs, and to misleading Congress about the extent of Trump’s involvement in talks to erect a building in Moscow with his name on it. Democratic leaders were wary of treading on the toes of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, but nonetheless hoped that Cohen’s testimony would be Watergate-level explosive. In the end, Cohen did not come armed with hard proof of Russian collusion but did present documentation linking Trump directly to the hush-money payments. Ro Khanna, a Democratic member of the committee, described this as a “smoking gun,” one that demonstrated Trump was, at minimum, guilty of “garden-variety financial fraud.”

At the hearing, Khanna was seated next to Stacey Plaskett, a non-voting Democratic delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands; when it was her turn to question Cohen, she asked which other former Trump staffers the committee should haul in. Plaskett took input on that line of inquiry from Jeffrey Epstein—the financier who had been convicted of soliciting sex from a minor a decade before—with whom she was texting during the hearing. “Hes opened the door to questions re who are the other henchmen at trump org,” Epstein wrote, of Cohen. He also told Plaskett, “You look great.” Within months, Epstein would be dead in jail, following his arrest on charges of prolific child sex trafficking. That we now know about his exchanges with Plaskett is thanks to the Oversight Committee, which, last year, released tranches of files that it procured from Epstein’s estate. Meanwhile, Khanna worked with the gadfly Republican congressman Thomas Massie on a bill that would force Trump’s second-term Justice Department to make public all the Epstein documents in its possession, with minimal redactions. Trump—who had a long, if not provably criminal, relationship with Epstein and spent last summer railing against Democrats for perpetuating an Epstein “hoax”—finally caved, signing the measure into law. (The D.O.J. was later accused of withholding, before eventually posting, pages detailing allegations that Trump himself sexually abused a minor in the eighties, a claim that he has vehemently denied. Plaskett, for her part, has acknowledged that texting with Epstein was a “bad idea” but argued that, as a former prosecutor, she has “learned to receive information from sources I do not like to obtain information that helps me get to the truth.”)

The contents of the files have embarrassed Democrats as much as Republicans; in addition to Plaskett, they have cast a deeply unflattering (if, again, not necessarily criminal) light on the behavior of Bill Clinton, in addition to other former officials, aides, and donors. Khanna’s centrality to such a crusade isn’t a surprise, if only because of his career-long commitment to idiosyncrasy: he is a Bernie Sanders acolyte who represents Silicon Valley in Congress and has been described as an “ambassador” for the tech industry; J. D. Vance and Steve Bannon have praised him (even if Vance sometimes finds him “very annoying”); he preaches bipartisanship, then practices it—not by building consensus around managerial centrism, per the stultifying Beltway credo, but by allying with hard-core right-wing ideologues, including, on the Epstein files, the likes of Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Khanna would perhaps be the candidate most likely to win the 2028 Democratic Presidential primary, for which he definitely seems to be preparing himself, if only MAGA Republicans could vote in it. (Recently, he called for the assembly of a populist coalition of left and right, and Greene tentatively endorsed the idea.) He has said that there are “two different frames for me”—progressive coalition-builder or rank opportunist—proving that he is both politically unusual and unusually savvy about how he is portrayed in the media, where he is, as the old saw goes, unavoidable for comment.

What I do find surprising is how unifying a rallying cry “Release the Epstein files!” has become across Khanna’s party. Epstein’s crimes have long provoked bipartisan disgust, but their revival as a political concern in the second Trump Administration was initiated by right-wing conspiracy theorists adjacent to, if not soaked in, the broader QAnon belief that a cabal of liberal pedophiles controls the world. By the time Khanna and Massie’s bill came up for a vote, in November, only a single member of Congress voted against it, citing concerns about due process—and that was Representative Clay Higgins, a hard-right Republican. Earlier this year, nine Democrats on the Oversight Committee voted to recommend holding Clinton in criminal contempt of Congress as part of a push to question him about Epstein, and three likewise voted to do so for Hillary Clinton, even though she has no direct link to Epstein. (Khanna was not among the nine or the three; both Clintons avoided contempt proceedings by agreeing to be deposed in late February.) When Pam Bondi was ousted as Attorney General, top Democrats cited her mishandling of the files as among their primary grievances with her tenure, giving it comparable prominence to her (much more pressing) vengeance campaign against Trump’s perceived enemies. If the President’s Epstein stonewalling initially enraged his base, the issue is arguably now more animating for Democrats than for Republicans.

Khanna told me that Democratic voters are indeed animated by the plight of Epstein’s survivors, but, more than anything, he characterized his focus on the files as a matter of reaching across the aisle, calling it “the first time since Donald Trump came down the escalator that we actually engaged with the MAGA base about their frustrations and anger at the system, and said, ‘We want to partner with you instead of shaming you.’ ” Whatever the issue’s current valence among the electorate, that so many high-ranking Democrats have taken it up hints at a profound, if not yet fully realized, break with the Party’s politics dating back to that escalator ride, and perhaps further still. “For the past fifteen, twenty years, Democrats have become the party of protecting institutions, and standing up for the rule of law, and arguing for everyone to get a fair trial, for the legal system to work its process,” Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist who served as a senior adviser to Gina Raimondo, Joe Biden’s Commerce Secretary, told me. Legacki has been struck by “the extent to which Democrats have been willing to embrace the idea that, if the American people wanna see the files, show ’em the files.”

For Legacki, this approach carries a “huge risk”—of spewing out uncorroborated information, or tarring people with guilt by association—that is “a major departure from how politics in the U.S. has often operated” and also reflects “a breakdown of trust in institutions, on both sides.” I agree entirely. Given the scale of Epstein’s crimes, highlighting due-process concerns can feel small-bore, or even like apologism. Yet they are important not only to the Epstein saga itself but to a much bigger, and still unresolved, debate over the direction of the Democratic Party, which has traditionally been seen as defending the institutions that Trump has trashed. “I flipped the script,” Khanna told me. But what does the new script say? And what if portions of the old one are worth keeping?

When the Epstein story flared last summer, there was nothing inevitable about the script flipping. Khanna told me that colleagues had warned him he would undermine his “serious brand” as an economic wonk by tying himself to a “crackpot” conspiracy theory; one anonymous lawmaker complained to Axios that “this whole thing is just such bulls**t.” The Democratic National Committee and Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, marshalled Epstein as a talking point, but in terms that left open the possibility that there was no grand conspiracy afoot and that Trump and his allies were merely reaping baseless nonsense they long ago sowed. Many Democrats initially dismissed what they saw as “QAnon nutty theories,” even as they recognized that they “really tripped up Republicans on their own stuff,” Paul Mitchell, a Democratic data consultant, told me. At the time, he likened Democrats harping on Epstein to the N.B.A. tactic of fouling Shaquille O’Neal because he struggled to score free throws—effective, perhaps, but a little unsavory.

For years, Democratic leaders had seemed wedded to procedural responses to Trump, and to the ideal that nobody is above the law, embodied most visibly by the Mueller probe, then Trump’s impeachments, then the criminal cases he faced after leaving office. During the first Trump term, the Democratic base thought of Mueller almost as a matinée idol—the ramrod-straight lawman come to restore order—and fans of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put her face on tote bags. Does the fact that none of this was effective—at least in the sense that Trump hasn’t been driven from the political scene for good—suggest that Democrats should now fight dirtier? With the midterms approaching, certain primaries have reflected broader debates about whether the Party might consider cursing more, capitalizing tweets, going Dark Woke. In Texas, James Talarico, an almost cartoonishly pious seminarian, defeated Jasmine Crockett, a Congresswoman whose many controversies have included calling Greene “butch” and ejecting a reporter from a rally for, per a member of her staff, being “a top-notch hater.” In Maine, Graham Platner, a rough-hewn populist who had to cover up a Nazi tattoo, looks set to handily beat Janet Mills, the polished seventy-eight-year-old incumbent governor. (Platner has said that he did not know about the tattoo’s Nazi associations when he got it.)

Epstein is hardly the only issue that these and other Democrats are talking about. But the story line has become unusually sticky—a noteworthy feat under a President who floods the zone with so many outrages that it can sometimes be hard to remember last week’s scandals. (Even Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran didn’t wipe Epstein from the news cycle for long—and not just thanks to Melania Trump’s apropos of nothing-to-hide-with-regard-to-Jeffrey-Epstein press conference.) More notable still, perhaps, is the fact that calling for the release of the Epstein files has seemed to cut across the myriad divisions rending the Democratic Party. Crockett, who serves on the Oversight Committee, has been a vigorous inquisitor regarding Trump’s ties to Epstein, sparring memorably with Bondi on the matter, and warning the President that “we are going to be on his ass.” Even the mild-mannered Talarico has said that QAnon got “one big thing” wrong—the belief that Trump would dismantle “this secret pedophile ring when he’s right in the middle of it.” When the Oversight Committee deposed Hillary Clinton, she cast her subpoena as part of a D.O.J. coverup, saying, “I would like to know, like every other American deserves to know, what is in those files.” Asked whether she thought Epstein might have been a spy, she said that she didn’t know, but that it’s “absolutely essential” the committee find out.

It is possible to see the Party’s Epstein energy as less of a script-flipping than a natural evolution. Some Democrats I interviewed, including Pat Dennis, the president of the Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, insisted that they’ve been concerned about Epstein for years; Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, has claimed that he pushed for the release of the files in 2019, following Epstein’s arrest. (Though the “Epstein files” didn’t really exist as a unified political concept back then, Schumer did call for clarity with respect to Epstein’s lenient 2008 prosecution—and gave away sums that Epstein had donated to his past campaigns.) More broadly, Democrats’ current Epstein rhetoric could be said to echo the righteous fury that they expressed at the height of the #MeToo movement, during Trump’s first term. Less charitable observers, especially on the right, might cast it as the latest iteration of a years-long effort to smear Trump. (Schumer and others have certainly used the story to troll the President, calling him “Epstein Don” and asking, for instance, whether Epstein was “THE REAL REASON TRUMP HAD KIMMEL CANCELED?!,” exemplifying the extraordinarily annoying Democratic tic of interpreting everything Trump does as an attempt to distract from the files.) Dennis pointed out to me that the “cliché Resistance libs” who seized on the Mueller story are now seizing on the Epstein story, because they tend to “glom on” to whatever is prominently in the news.

I think that there are elements of truth to all these views. But, as the story has developed, the Democratic response has increasingly suggested less patience for the process-oriented guardrails of Trump 1.0. Mitchell told me that, once the files started to be released, lawmakers who might initially have been reluctant to take up the issue were, “like, ‘Wait, what?!’ ” (“I don’t know if this is a never-ending buffet of crime and pedophilia,” Mitchell added. “But it is something that Democrats are looking at and realizing that there’s just a lot more there than they ever expected.”) Recently, Democrats in Congress helped to force the resignation of the California representative Eric Swalwell, just days after he was accused of raping a staffer (a claim he denies)—an outcome that they likely would have sought prior to this Epstein moment but not, perhaps, with such lightning speed, and without waiting for the House Committee on Ethics or a court to weigh in first. In the aftermath of Swalwell’s departure, Summer Lee, a progressive congresswoman, told the Intercept that the Epstein story has exposed how deeply the existing mechanisms for seeking justice “are failing us—all while protecting perpetrators with money, connections, or status. That legacy demands more from all of us right now.”

The liberal discourse that surrounded the Mueller probe was hardly free of the conspiratorial or the crude—I’m sorry to have to bring the alleged Trump pee tape back to your attention—but the probe itself, and Democrats’ faith in it, was broadly rooted in the idea that the legal system could hold Trump to account. If those were the days of Mueller as matinée idol, what I and others liked to call the Mueller-industrial complex of legal pundits filled the prime-time hours by nerding out over D.O.J. arcana and prosecutorial procedure.

Mueller veneration—and the wider invocation of “norms” that defined this era of liberal commentary—was often toe-curling, and turned out to be naïve. But norms themselves aren’t all bad, and, as the Epstein-files story has unfolded, I’ve fretted about those which have been overridden: most centrally, the standard D.O.J. aversion to publishing millions of scarcely vetted documents in which the vast majority of people named haven’t been charged with a crime, and are, in many cases, victims, witnesses, or bystanders. The risks of this—in a case linked inextricably to fantastical thinking, in a country with a political-violence problem—have always seemed obvious to me, and being concerned about them doesn’t have to mean making excuses for the very rich people whose stomach-churning (if, again, mostly noncriminal) conduct has been exposed. Democracies have other ways of holding such people to account. Good journalism, for starters, involves careful vetting, and has been a prime mover of the wider Epstein saga.

Even if you believe, as I do, that cheering on this sort of mass disclosure of sensitive material represents a quietly radical break from the Democrats’ Mueller-era posture, it would be wrong to say that the Party has abandoned proceduralism altogether, including in its Epstein-files push. At least one progressive strategist believes that, on Epstein, the Party has been overly process-oriented, and it’s true that the Oversight Committee, a body that trades in hearings and depositions, has become the hub of the action. Lee, the progressive congresswoman, serves on that committee, where she was one of the three Democrats to recommend holding Hillary Clinton in contempt. She has cast this vote in institutionalist terms, arguing that she was seeking to protect the legitimacy of the committee’s subpoena power, even if this particular subpoena was an example of G.O.P. “weaponization.” Khanna has argued that he doesn’t generally support changing D.O.J. norms surrounding disclosure and sees the Epstein case as a unique exception.

But Khanna’s reasoning—essentially, that the intense public interest in the files demands transparency and that the American public can be trusted to be judicious with unverified claims therein—is not very convincing. If anything, great public pressure being brought to bear is a terrible reason to dispense with due-process protections designed to protect the legal rights of individuals, and crafting one exception would seem to create a precedent for crafting others. Khanna put to me a somewhat stronger argument: that, in this case, the demand for disclosure had to work its way through the legislative process. “That’s the check,” he said. “It’s very, very, very hard to pass a law.”

This is true, now more than ever, but even a sclerotic Congress is susceptible to public passions. The release of the Epstein files hasn’t yet led anyone to, say, take a gun into a D.C.-area pizza parlor to confront a Clinton-led pedophile ring, but it has inevitably fanned conspiracies online (some of them very pizza-y) and exposed information that should clearly have remained private, including explicit images, and details identifying both survivors who’d wished to remain anonymous and incarcerated people who apparently coöperated with federal prosecutors. The D.O.J. was required by Khanna and Massie’s law to protect victims’ privacy, and the department is, of course, primarily responsible for failures to do so. And yet, at least as a practical matter, the tight timeline that the law imposed on the D.O.J., and that body’s manifest Trump-era incompetence, made such errors utterly foreseeable. In February, Khanna went on the House floor and named six supposed co-conspirators of Epstein’s whose identities, he felt, had wrongly been redacted in the files. The Guardian subsequently reported that four of the men had no connection to Epstein’s case whatsoever, beyond having appeared in a photo lineup. Khanna has maintained that a D.O.J. mistake was to blame, though he thanked the Guardian for pointing out his error, and stressed that he quickly corrected himself online. (More recently, he concluded that “you don’t want members of Congress just naming people in the Epstein files without any context.”)

Khanna has said that he doesn’t “want pitchforks”—not “even against people who are billionaires”—and, over all, it’s untenable to characterize the release of the Epstein files as a witch hunt, owing to the very real grotesqueries therein. And more may yet emerge: although the D.O.J. has put out millions of files, Khanna and his colleagues have accused it of withholding, or excessively redacting, millions more. (This week, the department’s inspector general said that it was reviewing whether the law had been followed.) At least for now, however, it’s possible to reach several conclusions simultaneously: that the number of powerful people whom the files have painted in a bad light is shockingly high; that the odds of criminal accountability for most of those people currently seem slim; that the available files don’t offer proof of a widespread child-sex-trafficking conspiracy in any case; and that using them to make broad claims about predation by élites is a clear example of availability bias, given that the vast majority of powerful people aren’t meaningfully implicated in them. Much Democratic rhetoric has elided the nuances of these concurrent truths. This, too, represents an intriguing shift in the Party’s Trump-era approach—even if this one might not be as radical as it first appears.

For certain Democrats, the Epstein saga has long been a way into talking about other topics, or at least to reëstablishing the trust needed to earn a hearing. Khanna has said that the Epstein-files story is symbolic of a rigged system that people are furious about and that Democrats won’t be able to use government to execute their priorities—in Khanna’s case, a vision of renewal that he has defined, variously, as “progressive capitalism” and “economic patriotism”—until they acknowledge that anger. Indeed, he claimed, last summer, that the Epstein files constituted “the beginning of the rebirth of the Democratic Party as a populist party.” More recently, he and others have started talking about an “Epstein class.”

This is a pithy label, but what exactly it invokes is unclear or, at least, mutable; at times, it seems to blur into the idea of the élite, writ large, and yet Khanna has specified that it refers only to a subsection that has engaged in “heinous” acts. Political shorthand needn’t always be precise to be resonant, but the stakes for Khanna’s politics, in particular, feel significant, given that he represents Silicon Valley. He has recently drawn an apparently billionaire-backed primary challenge after supporting a wealth tax, but since his election, in 2016, he has attempted to build bridges between tech tycoons and the disenfranchised working class in the name of wealth creation and rejected the progressive slogan that “every billionaire is a policy failure.” Khanna told me, “If you are a business leader . . . committed to the rebuilding of America, to investment in the working class, then we want you on our side.” But if you are “extracting” wealth, and using the resultant power and status to evade justice, then “we need to call you out.”

Many billionaires who are extracting wealth, however, do not appear in the Epstein files, and the implication that they might be part of an Epstein “class” strikes me, perversely, as both an unfair taint and somehow letting them off the hook; the files certainly do demonstrate élite impunity, but, at some point, focussing on them risks putting a face on corruption that is cartoonishly, personally evil, rather than structural. The Epstein-files story gaining purchase across the ideological breadth of the Democratic Party may represent a departure, but its embrace by even corporate Democrats suggests that, as a populist rallying cry, it may only be inch-deep. Objecting to the invocation of an “Epstein class” can feel dissatisfyingly close to crying, “Not all billionaires!” But what if it’s an impediment to a more substantive message for the Democratic Party: “Yes, all billionaires!”?

Last year, before the Epstein-files story blew up, Khanna wrote that the country was at a “fork in the road.” The Democrats, he continued, would need to offer transformational change or watch it “continue to succumb to a burn-it-all-down political nihilism.” Perhaps the latter must be indulged a bit to build a platform for the former—forests sometimes need to burn in order to thrive. But what happens if the Epstein-files story razes the entire forest, torching whatever trust is left in the political establishment, the Democratic Party very much included? Releasing the files, at least, is not a burn any politician can control. The idea that transparency offers a route to closure is already proving illusory. If it no longer feels quite right to refer to the Epstein-files story as a conspiracy theory, given what the documents have revealed, it remains of that world in the sense that, whatever new truths are unveiled, those who go down the rabbit hole will always be tempted to go further.

Perhaps the most consequential conundrum for Democrats is the one Legacki mentioned to me: that the wider Democratic interest in the Epstein-files story appears, in part, to channel liberal voters’ disenchantment with the institutions that not only failed to protect Epstein’s victims but didn’t act as a brake on Trump, either. Voters of both parties “don’t trust the processes we have for accountability,” Lee, the progressive congresswoman, told me. “The American people do not think that our institutions, our leaders, can be self-governing. I don’t think that they’re wrong.” Some Democrats doubtless see this moment as an opportunity to put tired, ultimately ineffectual talk of “norms” and “democracy” behind them; those more minded to rebuild institutions on the scorched earth of Trumpism are already having to reckon with the fact that a return to normalcy doesn’t seem possible and that much of their base may not want it anyway. Mitchell, the data consultant, told me that, in some ways, the Epstein-files story “rhymes” with last year’s redistricting initiative in California, in which Mitchell played a central role. Initially, liberal voters weren’t expected to approve the suspension of anti-gerrymandering rules as a means of countering the G.O.P.’s dirty tricks in other states; in the end, the suspension easily won. (This week, voters in Virginia approved a similar measure, though the margin was finer.) It’s an “open question,” Mitchell said, whether Democrats will “return to our better angels” upon eventually regaining power or “instead say, basically, for lack of a better term, ‘fuck this.’ ”

For now, nothing is settled, and the Party hasn’t totally shed its old skin. In anticipation of regaining the House in the midterms, lawmakers on the Oversight Committee, for example, are preparing to intensify probes regarding not only Epstein—they plan, for one, to call in Trump, claiming that the recent Bill Clinton subpoena set a new precedent with respect to Presidential testimony—but other aspects of Trump’s corruption that would sound more familiar to those who followed the battles of his first term.

Last month, Khanna appeared on the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” where he was asked what he considered to be the bigger failure of Merrick Garland, who served as Biden’s Attorney General: not prioritizing the Epstein files or not successfully prosecuting Trump. Without hesitation, Khanna picked the latter, then said that Kamala Harris would have been more effective as Attorney General, citing her fierce committee appearances as a senator during Trump’s first term. “When we get power again, I’m all for reconciliation, I’m all for bringing the country together, but we cannot move on without accountability,” Khanna said. He listed people who will need to be prosecuted: the agents who killed Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the DOGE wrecking crew, officials who committed war crimes. And, he added, “the Epstein class.” ♦